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Topic: Idea: CK2: M&F Total Conversion Mod (Read 8888 times)

So, I happened on to how to make custom maps for CK2 the other day and thought "this doesn't look too difficult". Thus, I figured that'd be a pretty good publicity for this game if we modded another game to play like it.

The big things would be: 1) getting a version of the map we can work with--I think Ren would know the details on this, 2) get a listing of every character that is a lord, preferably with the descriptions for them so we can add them in, along with previous lords 3) historical logs of what regions were owned by different realms at different points, 4) adapting certain things (lordless estates, slumberblight (heh), First Ones, and the Void) and 5) a metric ton of data entry.

Most of this M&F already tracks or has the ability to provide, it'd just be transcribing it to something CK2 could understand.

Some creative liberties could be taken on orders, so they are things that First Ones can take part in after the order is created, and they'd be handled a bit differently than they are here. Same thing for trade cities and the like.

This would also be an amazing opportunity to incorporate a lot of the player lore into events and such. And the game's own history, like the Fading Isles Revolt, the breaking up of Rathgar, the many Emeperors of EI, etc.

And for the map, Tom, from what I understand of M&F's map, it actually tracks basically everything that makes up the game's map as a separate thing. That is, this area has trees, that area has mountains, this area is that humid, that area isn't, etc., right?

If I'm correct, this would also be the same dataset you use to generate the different maps for the game, everything from heightmapping to humidity, right?

If so, would it be possible for us to either get specific maps rendered to a specification, or to get the dataset for the map itself so we could do this on our own?

For this to work without us having to remake the entire map a few times over, I'd need the following maps at the dimensions of 2048*2048 if the game map is as square as I think it is, in 24 bit bitmap (.bmp) files:

1. A map outlining every region. Better if it can automatically generate every region as a different, unique, solid RGB color. No outlines would be needed in that case.2. A grey-scale topography map. Darker areas being lower, whiter areas being higher.3. A two color map of all water/land.4. A Terrain map, RGB colored as follows: All Water 69,91,186; All Grasslands 86,124,27; All Forests 0,86,6; Regular mountains 65,42,17; Inaccessible Mountains 155,155,155; Deserts 206,169,99; Thin scrublands 255,186,0; Scrublands 86,124,27; Marshes 40,180,149;

Looks like a normal map/bump map, fairly standard in 3D rendering these days. That should be something that can be generated from the topography (height) map. Let's see... there's a converter here: http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/. If I feed the CK2 topography map into that, it produces something which looks like the provided lighting map, albeit with the normals rotated a bit.

Since it can be done algorithmically, the CK2 engine might actually generate it at runtime if you supply the height map and not the normal map. Hopefully they've done that, because it makes modders' jobs easier.

For this to work without us having to remake the entire map a few times over, I'd need the following maps at the dimensions of 2048*2048 if the game map is as square as I think it is, in 24 bit bitmap (.bmp) files:

1. A map outlining every region. Better if it can automatically generate every region as a different, unique, solid RGB color. No outlines would be needed in that case.2. A grey-scale topography map. Darker areas being lower, whiter areas being higher.3. A two color map of all water/land.4. A Terrain map, RGB colored as follows: All Water 69,91,186; All Grasslands 86,124,27; All Forests 0,86,6; Regular mountains 65,42,17; Inaccessible Mountains 155,155,155; Deserts 206,169,99; Thin scrublands 255,186,0; Scrublands 86,124,27; Marshes 40,180,149;

Your land_water map is good enough, it can be easily repainted so there is no problem there. Though it needs the big rivers outlined there too.

The outlines map will be used for provinces and is good enough, though ocean provinces should be painted too though they can't be too big else the game will crash on startup iirc. I wonder Tom can't you assign a unique RGB colour for each province? Painting that is gonna be a drag. Here is an example of a painted in province map: http://oi65.tinypic.com/30jrxcj.jpg

The terrain map is gorgeous as is though eventually I will do slight retouches.

The height map is wrong, this is supposed to be the topology map working this way:

FARevolution, the Terrain map is solely so the game knows what region type an area is for combat bonuses. I went with the closest similarities that CK2 would understand. Another map will make it look pretty.

We'll have to handle ocean provinces manually, which isn't all that hard to do. Just drawing some lines and making them interesting.

As for recoloring, it'll be tedious. Not impossible. I've got some time coming up that I could throw at it I think. Heck, I could probably even do it during one of my night shifts. I'm a Paint fiend.